Totally agreed. I was 100% in the pro-controlled-burn camp until I happened to stumble upon the consequences of rubber hitting the road.
A few months back I was visiting family in New Mexico and chatting with some locals. I asked offhandedly about if they did controlled burns out where we were… and boy did I immediately realize it was a sore subject. Last year, the US Forest Service set off the biggest wildfires in the state’s history doing controlled burns, by irresponsibly starting them in the windy season and not monitoring appropriately.
“Only” a hundred or so homes were destroyed, but imagine if the federal government were to burn down your home, livestock, and property only to abdicate any responsibility and fail to have any modicum of transparency or accountability. The nominal monetary damages do not nearly capture the social harm caused by the incident, and there’s been little trace of accountability when it comes to the policy makers who approved the burn, living thousands of miles away and suffering none of the impact.
This is not a good reason to be anti-controlled burn. You said yourself that this was due to negligence by the USFS. If anything this should highlight the importance of doing controlled burns so that there is minimal chance of these raging infernos cropping up. Rather than blaming the burn, maybe people need to be held responsible instead.
> This is not a good reason to be anti-controlled burn. You said yourself that this was due to negligence by the USFS
You're not contradicting anything, that's literally the topic of this subthread. From the GGP:
> We need to acknowledge that the solutions will cause less overall harm than not implementing them, but also recognize that the harms from the solutions may fall unevenly, and find ways to socialize the damage those solutions cause, rather than leave that damage on the powerless.
> Rather than blaming the burn, maybe people need to be held responsible instead.
Wherein you've created the same problem in the opposite direction. Who's going to volunteer to do controlled burns if they can be held personally liable for failures?
Starting from "prove you didn't cause the problem" with such a dynamic and hard to control activity is setting up the same issue.
Most reasonable people understand the difference between accident and negligence. How is it we are able to have professional engineers sign on off plans if they know they will be held personally liable for failures? This is very much a solved problem and I don’t think it’s wise to entertain FUD.
People get sued all the time (and lose) due to damage caused by accidents (that weren’t negligence).
Professional engineers ARE held personally liable for failures. That’s why there aren’t that many of them, and they tend to be extremely conservative and most things they sign off on are very limited in scope.
No sane PE would ever sign off on a realistic prescribed burn plan, because they couldn’t control the variables enough to not get ruined. Any plan a PE would sign off wouldn’t be implementable because, surprise, conditions change rapidly and it’s not economic to do detailed real-time surveying of overgrown areas that need prescribed burns all the time.
Agreed; I don’t mean to imply I’m firmly against controlled burns now.
I am disenchanted with our current system for executing them in the US, however. Like you say, we need a system for accountability to deal with the externalities.
A few months back I was visiting family in New Mexico and chatting with some locals. I asked offhandedly about if they did controlled burns out where we were… and boy did I immediately realize it was a sore subject. Last year, the US Forest Service set off the biggest wildfires in the state’s history doing controlled burns, by irresponsibly starting them in the windy season and not monitoring appropriately.
“Only” a hundred or so homes were destroyed, but imagine if the federal government were to burn down your home, livestock, and property only to abdicate any responsibility and fail to have any modicum of transparency or accountability. The nominal monetary damages do not nearly capture the social harm caused by the incident, and there’s been little trace of accountability when it comes to the policy makers who approved the burn, living thousands of miles away and suffering none of the impact.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/new-mexico-wildfire-prescribed-...
https://www.fs.usda.gov/news/releases/statement-chief-randy-...